[In the following excerpted review, Glass claims that despite its limitations, A People's History provides information on groups omitted from standard textbooks.]

A People's History of the United States, … attempts, in its author's words:

to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.

(emphasis added)

Thus, in his first chapter, Professor Zinn promises to relate the familiar episodes of American history from at least 13 different points of view. If he fails in that nearly impossible task, which he does, he succeeds admirably in his second objective of ‘disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win’. He may not be able to tell the story of America from dozens of conflicting perspectives (he has one perspective, that of a moderately left-wing American political scientist), but he does reveal much about the people who are usually missing from American history text books: the Arawaks, Cherokees, the English settlers who fled starvation and oppression in the early colonies to live with the Indians, the landless Hudson River farmers, the Negro soldiers of several wars, the Wobblies, women workers, sharecroppers, Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, Cubans, Filippinos and Vietnamese.

Standard American histories ignore many of the incidents (the great railroad strike of 1877, the Haymarket massacre and trials, the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe Hill and the Rosenbergs) which Professor Zinn emphasizes. What is missing from his otherwise interesting, if undramatic, account are enough primary sources (as in his discussion of pre-Civil War class conflicts, pp. 214ff), a coherent overview of the development of the country in the past 200 years (of the kind found in, say, Claude Julien's Le Rêve et l'histoire, Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1976) and sufficient evidence to support his own contentions.